randform

speaking about virtual architectural icons in my last post, it worthwhile to mention that the american company Lichtenstein Creative Media is organizing concerts and interviews in the commercial (and expensive) virtual environment called second life. On their webpage they currently feature a virtual concert with wellknown songwriter Suzanne Vega, including a machinima of her concert. If the link is gone — here is another youtube machinima of the concert.

Also MIT professor John Maeda was there. Reflecting on his second life experience in his blog, Maeda suddenly expressed his concern for mathematicians (thats how i interpret it ;)):

At the recent SIGGRAPH, one of the most popular talks was the fellow from i>SL where he spoke about the higher “emotional bandwidth” one gets with communicating through a fully-rendered avatar versus a pitful smiley like :-). Our resident media philospopher Burak took great offense at this comment. He felt that signs/symbols were invented not because we crave for constant realism in life, but that we can get engage deeper feeling through experiencing abstractions of reality. The more abstract the better, in his mind.

And that’s where it is: “in his mind.” Where the emotional bandwidth is truly the highest and where no computers (currently) can venture. To live without reality (or even a simulation of it) and to instead be immersed in a sea of symbols and even more abstract thoughts. Seems like one can go crazy in such a world.

So let’s wait for Madonna to appear there — would relieve her may be from the pressure to do cosmetic surgery for being an icon.

Did the tarsier eat the simple apple because there was a worm inside?

— a celtic moddyfying case modding of apple power book logo design on this video.
—nintendo DS modding
–PC case modding in the upcoming part II of the games convention report…if I find time to upload the images.

The VVR berek – a subsidiary company of the Berlin public transport company BVG which is in charge for selling advertisement spaces in Berlin public transport is going to be sold. Unexpectedly…
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The above square shows the location of the only earthquake that happened near Berlin, Germany in the last seven days (more…)

A classic topic in intersections between math and art/design are tesselations. This is mostly due to the fact that the included math is almost completely visualizable, which can’t be said for most parts of mathematics.
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“empathic paintings” by Shugrina, Betke and Collomosse

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Yesterday the New York Times as well as the Wall Street Journal published an article about a new motion capture device called “Contour” which was apparently shown at siggraph yesterday and which was developped by former Apple Computer engineer Steve Perlman.
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From July 19 to 21 the annual conference “New Media and Technologies of the IT Society” (“Neue Medien und Technologien der Informationsgesellschaft”) took place under the title “Film, Computer and TV”. (more…)

This is “old” news. There is an archeological site in Iran called “Burnt city” – a settlement which dates back to 2000-3000 BC. There a goblet of 8 by 10 cm was found on which a goat between two plants is depicted in various jumping positions. If one takes the positions together, it is clear that the movement of a goat was to be displayed.
The researchers put the images in a timely order…so one can see the 5000 years old animation in modern fashion.

The original post was I think from Irans’s Cultural Heritage news agency . However their link to the animation is broken (at the moment their whole site unfortunately doesn’t work properly) but I found another link here.

In the blog post “LaTeX and Metafont” two projects which massively scan in books were mentioned. Another mentionable project is the Gutenberg project. Here one can find e.g. the book of (more…)